Saturday, November 03, 2012

Welcome to the companion site to Associations in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (= AGRW).

Using tools in the right sidebar, you can browse or search a growing online database of inscriptions and papyri about associations, immigrant groups, and guilds in the ancient Mediterranean, including many documents that do not appear in the book (marked with an asterisk*).

The plan is to have more translations and photos contributed to this website by scholarly experts around the world with coordination by Richard S. Ascough, Philip A. Harland, and John S. Kloppenborg ...

Philip adds in an e-mail:

Basically, users of the site can browse through hundreds of inscriptions (450 so far) involving guilds, immigrant groups, and other associations in the ancient Mediterranean. The user can browse by geography and by topics (including gods). There is also a feature I called "selected exhibits" on (hopefully) interesting topics to a general reader (with about 10 inscriptions in each exhibit). There are many documents with English translations, and the user can choose to view just those (in selected exhibits). One of the selected exhibits is for Judeans in the diaspora. The plan is to continue to expand the websitewith more inscriptions relating to these groups.

Friday, November 02, 2012

THE JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF JUDAISM has a new double issue out: vol. 43.4-5 (requires a paid personal or institutional subscription for access to full content).

From the Preface, by Hindy Najman and Eibert Tigchelaar:

We dedicate this special issue of the Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period (JSJ) to our colleague, teacher, and friend, Florentino García Martínez, who will resign this year as editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Study of Judaism and as one of the editors of the series Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism.

TOC:

Preface
pp. 453-454(2)
Authors: Najman, Hindy; Tigchelaar, Eibert

Articles

The Transformation of the Torah in Second Temple Judaism
pp. 455-474(20)
Author: Collins, John J.

The Vitality of Scripture Within and Beyond the “Canon“
pp. 497-518(22)
Author: Najman, Hindy
Classifications of the Collection of Dead Sea Scrolls and the Case of Apocryphon of Jeremiah C
pp. 519-550(32)
Author: Tigchelaar, Eibert

Thursday, November 01, 2012

The discussions that come alive in this book are Talmudic as well as academic, which may explain why this novel will have so much appeal for readers like myself who are steeped in the Talmudic text and the scholarship about its context. For readers who do not experience the pleasure of the familiar in its fictionalized form, Anton’s novel celebrates our rich and colorful textual heritage and reminds us that feminist history is often a return to the material and the real – to the beer the scholars drank, the springs in which they bathed, the cycle of blood that dictated their most intimate relationships, and the rooms in which they studied texts that occasionally refer to wives and daughters whose lives we can at best imagine.

Reviewed by Yaron Z. Eliav, University of Michigan (yzeliav@umich.edu)

Nearly two hundred years have passed since August Böckh launched the first comprehensive, academically standardized corpus of Greek inscriptions – the Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum – in 1815 (although the first volume was not published until 1828). The Eastern Mediterranean, originally seen as the less important periphery of the Roman world, has also claimed its epigraphic corpora – Syria’s Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, for example, started appearing in 1929. Now, remarkably late if one considers the centrality of this region in Christian and Jewish consciousness, it is the turn of Roman Judaea, known since the second century CE as Syria Palaestina or simply Palestine, with the Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP). Modern Middle Eastern politics has hindered the project: it does not include inscriptions from the region’s central hill or from the southern seashore plains, part and parcel of the political and cultural textures of the area’s past, but now separated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Academic intrigue caused the leading Greek epigraphist of Judaea/Palaestina – Leah Di Segni – to depart from the team working on the inscriptions, a professional and collegial loss. Only the high quality of the series makes these hurdles somewhat more tolerable.

Werner Eck, a German epigraphist with Mommsenian authority, and Hannah Cotton, a prominent Israeli papyrologist, have assembled an impressive international team to carry out this endeavor. They plan a nine-volume series; the first, a two-book volume on Jerusalem, was published in 2010/12. The current tome, volume II in the series, offers over a thousand inscriptions from the northern parts of the Israeli seashore, a sixty-mile stretch between modern Tel Aviv and Mount Carmel. Caesarea Maritima, the central port city of Roman Palestine and the seat of its governor, dominates the region and its epigraphical output with a total of 952 inscriptions, many of which were already published and discussed in earlier corpora.1 Along with Caesarea the current volume showcases a host of other smaller cities and towns in which inscriptions survived (including Apollonia/Arsuf, Castra Samaritanorum, Dora/Dor, and Sycamina).

[...]

A review of volume 1 is noted here. Background on the project is here and here and links.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Inscribed artefacts and copies of ancient manuscripts written in Phoenician/Punic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and Maltese will be among the exhibits on display at Ancestral Voices: Writings from the Past, an activity being held on November 7 from 10am to 7.30pm at the University’s Archeology Centre.

Alan T. Levenson introduces his book by suggesting that its scope
might be deemed "hubristic" and stating that it is "_not_ an original
piece of scholarship" (pp. 4, 5, his emphasis). One could say,
therefore, that the book is self-reviewing, but the overly modest
characterization does an injustice to a volume that is learned,
informative, insightful, often entertaining, and occasionally (but
constructively) annoying. The learning, culled from a wide array of
primary and secondary sources, is placed in the service of an effort
to "translate the findings of the academy for a wider audience"--an
effort that succeeds admirably (p. 5).